UPCOMING EVENTS

Eyespot, a start-up that lets people make video mashups, said it has raised a first round of funding of $3.7 million.

The round, led by Silicon Valley firm Gabriel Venture Partners, is the latest sign of how hot video editing tools are — now that the user-generated video revolution, a la YouTube, is underway.

We’ve mentioned EyeSpot before, when writing about a competing company called Movie Masher, which itself has just launched and is looking for a strategic buyer. Another player in this area is Jumpcut (bought by Yahoo). As explained, these companies let people overlay images on other videos — which is basically flash animation on video. You can mix video, photos and music into a single, edited video, and customize various aspects of these, changing and inverting image color, for example.

Here and below you see still images of the sorts of “gooey” and “drippy” videos people are creating (go to Eyespot to see a real video highlighting this). Movie Masher also illustrates elements of this.

Other investors in Eyespot include Express Ventures and executives from MP3.com and DivX, the company said.

EyeSpot wants to provide the technology to major media companies. Since its “beta” testing launch in April, it has signed partnerships with Lions Gate, Blip.tv, Veoh Networks, Current TV and various artists, it said.